Relay

How to spell relay

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce relay

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does relay mean?

1. verbTo pass on a message, signal, or piece of information from one person or point to another.
2. nounA team race in which each member completes part of the distance before handing over to the next.
3. nounAn electrically operated switch that uses a small current to control a larger circuit.

Relay in a sentence

• verb

  Please relay the meeting time to the rest of the department.

• noun

  Their school won the four hundred metre relay at the county final.

• noun

  The faulty relay kept cutting power to the pump.

• verb

  The control tower will relay the new flight path to the pilot.

• noun

  She ran the final leg of the swimming relay and clinched the gold.

• noun

  An engineer replaced the burnt-out relay in the control panel.

Where does relay come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English in the late 1300s from the Old French relaier, meaning 'to leave behind' or 'to release', built from the prefix re- ('back' or 'again') and laier ('to leave', a cousin of modern French laisser). In medieval hunting and travel, a relais was a set of fresh hounds or fresh horses stationed along a route, kept ready to take over from tired ones; this is the literal heart of the modern sense of handing a task on to the next in line. From the noun for these fresh teams grew the verb meaning to pass something along, and by the nineteenth century engineers borrowed the term for an electrical switch that 'relays' a small current to control a larger one. The athletic relay race, where runners hand on a baton, reflects exactly the same image of one fresh participant taking over from another. The spelling stays helpfully transparent: a clear re- followed by lay, so the trap is mainly remembering that it is one solid word with no hyphen.

How the word is built

• re- (back, again)
• -lay (from Old French laier, to leave or release)